Data nerds rejoice! More metro data now available.

On the new page you can take a quick poll about Metro’s services, sign up for Metro research opportunities and find links to transportation data resources. The page will also be a hub for sharing research data and reports inside and outside the agency.

In addition, results from 10 years of the annual customer satisfaction survey as well as several other surveys and focus groups are available for your perusal.

It doesn’t put a good public image of Metro if that is how the workers at Metro consider those who are good with numbers as “nerds.” Rather, it only reiterates the assumption that Metro really doesn’t care about numbers, facts, data points, solid research and figures but rather, just spend, spend, and spend with taxpayer money with no fiscal responsibility.

There is absolutely no way at the present moment to find out whether Metro transit riders tend to ride longer distances or shorter distances. We do not have a TAP-in and TAP-out system that is able to log and collect data on the average distance use of riders within the Metro system or which bus routes tend to consist of shorter riders or longer riders (i.e. the Metro 720 bus).

You’d think that would be a key vital data point that Metro should be analyzing. But some genius thought it was a brilliant idea to use the gate-less honor system so we never have had such a key data point that would’ve done wonders to make our train system more efficient.

I would like to see the ridership by each individual bus line because I believe that Metro has a mismatch of resources here. For example, Line 770 is always standing room only. This line really the e 45-foot buses to serve it.
On the other hand, Line 780 only picks up only ten people per stop, and yet this Line 780 uses the 45-foot buses. I believe that 40-foot buses should be more than sufficient.

Ridership is one thing, but the retention rate of how many passengers get on and off at any given stop is more important.

If you fill up passengers at the end points like the 770 and no one gets off in between, it’s always going to be full and no room is created to add new passengers.

As locked the gates already mentioned, Metro 720 is a good example of this. It’s always full and people are frustrated at because buses pass them by because there’s no room for additional passengers because very few people get off in between.

In this case, adding more buses or using longer buses doesn’t really solve the problem. One way is to get rid of seats altogether and make everyone stand to increase passenger capacity. A lot of transit agencies use different seating arrangements or get rid of a row of seats, even go as far as removing the seats altogether to increase aisle space. Standing passengers can fit so much more than sitting passengers.

Another is to use congestion pricing to alleviate the situation so that people who travel farther pay more to reduce the number of long distance riders hogging up all the space and create more room for hop-on and hop-off short distance riders.

When you look at it from this perspective, it’s odd why Metro never considered collecting data on what the average distance an average transit rider travels on a particular route. Do they do short trips, do they do long trips?